h gentle
reproach, he added: "Tis strange that I should feel so gay and light
of heart at the moment when I am about to lose my mother. Zeus,
methinks, has turned my brain, and made me laugh when I should weep.
But come, ye bold wooers, which of you will be the first to enter the
lists for this matchless prize, a lady without peer in all the land of
Hellas? Why sit ye thus silent? Must I show you the way? So be it,
then; and if I can bend the bow, and shoot an arrow straight, the
prize shall be mine, and my mother shall abide here in her widowed
state."

So saying he sprang up, flung off his cloak, and laid aside his sword.
And first he made a long shallow trench in the floor of the hall, and
set up the axes with their double heads in a straight line, stamping
down the earth about the handles to make all firm. Then he took the
bow from Eumaeus; it was a weighty and powerful weapon, fashioned from
the horns of an ibex, which were firmly riveted into a massive bridge,
and great force was required to string it. Telemachus set the end
against the floor, and strove with all his might to drive the string
into its socket. Three times he tried, and failed; but the fourth
time, making a great effort, he was on the point of succeeding, when
his father nodded to him to desist. "Plague on it!" cried Telemachus,
laying the bow aside with an air of vexation, "must I be called a
poltroon all my life, or is it that I have not yet attained the full
measure of my strength? Let the others now take their turn."

Then one by one the wooers rose up, in the order in which they sat,
and tried to bend the bow. The first to essay it was Leiodes, a
soothsayer, and a man of gentle and godly mind. But he was a soft
liver, unpractised in all manly pastimes, and the bow was like iron in
his white, womanish hands. "I fear that this bow will make an end of
many a bold spirit," he said, little guessing how true his words were
to prove; "for better it were to die than to go away beaten and broken
men, after all the long years of our wooing."

"Fie on thee!" cried Antinous, "thinkest thou that there are no better
men here than thou art? Doubt not that one of those present shall bend
the bow and win the lady." Then he called Melanthius, and bade him
light a fire, and bring a ball of lard to anoint the bow and make it
easier to bend. The lard was brought, and the wooers sat in turn by
the fire, rubbing and anointing the bow, but all to no purpose. Only